1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a fault detection apparatus and method utilizing a PCI (peripheral components interconnection) bus monitoring card. More specifically, the present invention is related to an apparatus and method for guaranteeing the integrity of the PCI bus by connecting a plurality of general purpose computers using a PCI bus and comparing the PCI bus signals between or among them.
2. Related Art
Typically, fault detection systems necessarily have their own central processing unit (CPU) boards or their own input/output buses. This leads to several disadvantages: an increase in design problems; increase in the time to develop new or modified systems; increased complexity of such systems; greater cost in developing and producing such systems; and increased probability of system malfunction or failure.
Exemplars of recent efforts in the art include U.S. Pat. No. 5,822,512 for Switching Control in a Fault Tolerant System issued to Goodrum et al. The aforementioned patent is different from the present invention.